Respiratory Infections News

WASHINGTON — Infectious Disease News and Healio.com are onsite at IDWeek 2019 to provide live coverage of the conference, held from Oct. 2 to 6.

Five months of active surveillance of acute respiratory viral infections among patients and staff at a long-term care facility revealed that 89% of staff with an acute respiratory illness reported going to work when they were ill, even though the facility had policies against working while sick.

WASHINGTON — Although influenza vaccination rates have increased, new data released by the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases indicated that barely half of U.S. adults plan to get vaccinated against influenza this season.

A tuberculosis prediction score based on diagnostic models may enable prompt treatment decisions in HIV-infected children with suspected TB and a high risk for mortality, according to research published in Pediatrics. Implementing the score would likely have significant public health benefits, the researchers noted.

Infectious diseases had been a big part of my training in medical school in India, where I cared for and learned from patients with a wide variety of infections from extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis to cerebral malaria to Japanese encephalitis to all types of vaccine-preventable diseases because of lack of health care access. I became fascinated by the specialty, and my interest was further bolstered by role models in residency. A fellowship in a strong inner-city clinical program under awesome mentors with a plethora of pathology was invaluable for the years to come. My first job out of training was in a rural community hospital and Federally Qualified Health Center as the first ID physician in the center. It’s been a rewarding experience to start and run a very busy rural ID practice, taking care of uninsured and underinsured patients in an area with a shortage of health professionals. Sharing strong bonds with patients living with HIV over last 7 years in a small rural community has been a learning experience about their challenges and successes. Absorbing the business side of medicine as a medical director has been equally eye opening. My role as a hospital epidemiologist and stewardship lead has allowed me to build cherished relationships with several medical specialties and hospital staff. I have to admit that I have also learned from patients and communities who may not always agree with me (with respect to management of Lyme disease and vaccine refusal). Keeping the dialogue open is the key.

Experts are developing and testing numerous vaccine candidates against norovirus, which causes hundreds of millions of infections each year worldwide and is seen as a top target for vaccine research. Infectious Disease News asked C. Buddy Creech, MD, MPH, and Leigh M. Howard, MD, MPH, of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Research Program and division of pediatric infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, what the world’s top vaccine priorities are.

Influenza remains an important threat to public health, and people with impaired immune systems are at particularly high risk for severe disease and complications. One comparative analysis showed that severely immunocompromised patients with influenza experienced significantly more hospitalizations, ICU admissions and mechanical ventilation than nonimmunocompromised patients. However, clinical signs and symptoms may be pronounced on initial presentation, underscoring the importance of seeking early medical attention. Additionally, antiviral resistance is more common and the mean viral shedding time was longer among immunocompromised patients (19 days compared with 6.4 days in healthy people).

In the summer of 2016, an outbreak of anthrax in the Russian Arctic that left dozens of people hospitalized and one 12-year-old boy dead was blamed on the thawing carcass of a reindeer that had died in the area’s previous anthrax outbreak in 1941.

An estimated 2.8 million pregnant women and newborns — approximately one every 11 seconds — die each year worldwide, mostly from preventable causes, according to a new report on female and child mortality released by UNICEF and WHO.

The incidence of laboratory-confirmed influenza-associated hospital admissions among infants may be more than 2 times higher than current estimates, according to findings from four low- and middle-income countries published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health.